Comps

Well, i have been mostely chilling in the previous months.
Besides chilling at home behind my PC trying out different new stuff with Ubuntu linux, customizing it and swearing when it doesn't work.
I have editied this configuration file /etc/X11/xorg.conf about 15 times at least.
The basic idea was i wanted to use ATI drivers for my graphics card. There are open source drivers available. These drivers need to be reverse engineered, since ATI refuses to give out any specifications for their graphics card. Luckily my graphics card is > 3 years old so the good people writing the drivers have managed to implement 3D support as well. They work rather well. However the drivers made by ati are about 30 - 100 % faster. So i spent lots of time trying to get them running, in the end i came to a conclusion ATI doesn't support my graphics card, so i need to installed some older drivers, which don't support the newest kernel. So basically i am screwed. I guess i will have to survive with less FPS.

On the other hand i must say wine has improved A LOT in the past couple of months, especially regarding direct3D.

Also, i have started with this new distributed computing projects. It's called QMC ( or quantum monte carlo at home ). basically it's some theoretical chemistry calculations. The team page is here. This reminds me of the times, when i was running a similar thing back at RCN. 14 2.4 Ghz P4. Not that was some computing power back then. I even managed to get within top 1000. Those where the times :)